In a wide-ranging conversation, the legendary documentary filmmaker and writer talks about interviewing killers, war criminals, and some of society’s most fascinating oddballs. Plus, his take on his best movie, his critics, and what he’ll do next.

A Duke zealot recounts the night Michael Jordan’s retired North Carolina jersey was seized. This is Errol Morris’s second of six shorts for ESPN Films, about the heights a few stupid fans were willing to climb to stoke the flames of a storied rivalry.

Dunking Ninja Monarchs

Where does The Dunking Ninja go from here? He’s already demolished the Deron Williams hot-girlfriend-moment from the 2005 Draft, given himself a race-bending nickname to go along with his race-bending game and masculinized “Jan.” By declaring that Blake Griffin was “the American Jan Vesely,” he topsy-turvied Mark Jones for thinking in such a simplistic, USA-centric manner and brought pride to the entire Czech Republic. Kids playing pick-up in Sady Svatopluka Čecha park in Prague will now refer to the Rucker as “The American Sady Svatopluka Čecha.”

3. THE MICHELANGELO DUNK: This should be for Round 1. Vesely comes out with a turtle shell strapped to his back. The day before the dunk contest, he should have his wisdom teeth taken out so that his head gets all lumpy and shaped like a Ninja Turtle head. The bandana thing he ties around his eyes should be orange and he should carry nunchucks because of all the Ninja Turtles, Jan Vesely is most like Michelangelo. The lights go down, the confetti floats from the ceiling and Vesely pirouettes, flops on his shell, spins on his shell and then vaults himself up for a one-handed hammer dunk.

Skip forward to 0:46 in this video. Like that.

After he lands, he opens up a box of New Domino’s, eats a slice and throws the rest of the steaming hot pizza in Dwight Howard’s face. The entire NBA is on notice. There’s only one superhero in the NBA. And he is a party dude. Later, it is revealed that the turtle shell was made of real sea turtle shells and weighed 2000 pounds.

2. THE SKODA DUNK: According to Wikipedia, Skoda is a car manufacturer based in the Czech Republic. They specialize in fuel-efficient cars for young people. Their coolest looking car is something called the Praktik.

Here is the description of the car on Skoda’s website:
This two-seater utility vehicle offers you comfort and easy manoeuvrability (sp) as well as the look of a passenger car. At the same time it is big enough for the needs of tradesmen with small or medium-sized businesses.

Anyway, this is what happens…. Vesely’s girlfriend drives the fuel-efficient hybrid Skoda Praktik onto the court. Just for the contest, Skoda has created a convertible version. Vesely dunks over the Praktik, hangs on the rim, dismounts, slaps the backboard with both hands, lands in the driver’s seat and peels the fuck out. Then, as Blake Griffin watches, he pulls donuts around the court and when he finally drives down the tunnel, the words, “YOUR MOVE, AMERICAN JAN VESELY” have been written out in burned rubber.

1. THE AUSTRIA-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE DUNK: We’re all thinking the same thing here. Vesely takes a page from the Gamblerz Crew in the great movie Planet B-Boy (in the video above, taken at the Battle of the Year in 2005, half the Gamblerz Crew dressed in red, the other half in blue to represent North and South Korea. Then they danced together to inspire unity…) and does a re-unification dunk. For this, he would need two balls. The first ball would have “CZECH REPUBLIC” written on it. The second, “SLOVAKIA.” Jan would run at the rim, elevate, but, instead of dunking both balls, he would smash them together into one ball and then jam the reunified ball into the rim. But this would be predictable and probably kind of offensive. Instead, Jan should go further back in history, back to the times of the Constitutional Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, which was made up of parts of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Italy, Croatia, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia/Montenegro, Slovakia and Bosnia/Herzogovina. That’s twelve countries. The idea for this dunk is the same as the re-unification dunk, but he does it with twelve balls. When he lands, his girlfriend is waiting with an emperor’s robe, a scepter and an oversized crown. Vesely puts the crown on his head, walks over to where King James is sitting and yells, “I AM THE HABSBURG MONARCH, LEADER OF A GREAT MULTINATIONAL EMPIRE! YOU WILL KISS THE RING!”

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